We hope that you enjoy the new slightly longer issue of Game! I certainly cannot promise that every issue of Game! will be as long as this one, but I intend to do my best to deliver the quality and size of magazine that will make it a good investment of your gaming dollars. Note that we are trying our best to enhance our coverage of miniatures, board wargames, rolegames, and computer games, but in a certain sense our articles mirror what people actually play. There are a lot of miniatures players, so there are a fair number of articles. The board wargame industry some years ago decided to move towards highly ornate printing processes, elaborate maps, and games with tens of pages of rules. This is all extremely expensive to produce, leading to games of enormous price, and has tended to reduce rather markedly the market for those games. Once upon a time, Avalon Hill published a list of board wargames that had sold 100,000 copies. We now see the 500 Press Order plan, in which a boardgame is manufactured when 500 firm orders are in hand. How the mighty have shrunk. On the other hand, once upon a time wargame magazines had pages of want ads, at which one could look to see if missing games were at long last on sale. That's all gone now, in that the magazines in question are no longer produced, while the supply of dealers managing obscure games has also shrunk. Miniatures sales seem to be doing far better. I note that the Historical Miniatures Gaming Society, the country's leading miniatures club, has between its various regional groups more than 6000 members, an assembly ten times the size of the largest board wargaming club (the International Federation of Wargaming, which just before its sudden collapse appears to have had close to 600 members). There are still surviving boardgaming groups. AHIKS continues to produce its redoubtable magazine. The Strategy Gaming Society is in a rocky patch with producing its magazine regularly, but this issue has arisen before, and the problem has been solved before. No matter your hobby interest, there are still gamers sharing your activities, so that I may safely close this message with our battle cry and promise of friendly games... Until Next Month: Gamers! To Your Tables! Back to Table of Contents -- Game! # 3 To Game! List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by George Phillies. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com